STEPHEN I. writes:

On a purely personal level, I was very pleased indeed to learn that Lawrence Auster loved and studied both English literature and law as a young man as those were my own two courses of undergraduate study at university. In the case of the former discipline, it was and remains my consuming passion – whilst the latter provided me with a living for almost 30 years. Not a great link to a great man but, then again, better than no link at all.

As anyone who has ever read any of Mr. Auster’s highly insightful, powefully reasoned and lucidly expressed articles at View from the Right and elsewhere must immediately appreciate, his disdain of a professional legal career certainly deprived your country, (or at least his native state),  of a brilliant lawyer – but his friends and admirers should know and take comfort that notwithstanding the personal difficulties that inevitably flowed to him from his principled decisions not to compromise by teaching English or practicing law professionally he surely made the right decision both for himself and for all of us who have learned from him.

I feel that I can say this because I spent almost 30 years practicing law in just about every possible context from the largest of national law firms and in-house legal departments in commercial corporations right through to practicing  law as an army officer. I was meant to be a lawyer and whilst I was not actually unhappy, when I closed my practice a couple of years ago and finally stood back to ponder what my career had actually meant with all its daily tediousness and unrelenting 70-hour weeks spent in the service of hundreds of individual clients, ( not one of whom, by the way, was ever entirely blameless in the dispute at the heart of their litigation), I had no ready answer.

It was only a few days ago that the answer finally came to me and it is one that I feel validates Mr. Auster’s decision to live the difficult and stressful life that he did: as a free-lance  teacher and speaker of truth in the wilderness. As I sat revisiting Henry David Thoreau over coffee in my local Burger King, (and yes, I am aware of how silly that sounds. Still, it might have been worse and been a pizza hut!), my eye happened to fall on the following line:

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid to me was when one asked me what I thought and attended to my answer.”

This is not, as it might at first appear, in praise of ego, but the reverse. It seems to me a recognition that a man or woman’s greatest value and fulfillment lays in the opportunity he or she has to impart the truth when he knows it. When, as an experienced lawyer I sat across a desk and was asked by clients what the law was given the facts of their particular situation they and I both knew that what they would hear from me was real and the truth and although the news imparted was not always pleasant because the law wasn’t always in their favour, they and I both knew that they were empowered and strengthened just by knowing it and they could act and organise their lives according to reality rather than on mere wishful thinking and fantasy.

How does this bear upon Mr Auster’s life? When I guided my clients the truth I was imparting  was limited both as to numbers and  its applicability. Even over a long career, I met and guided only a limited number of clients and the advice I gave them was always, and necessarily, tailored to their own specific circumstances at that time. Had Mr. Auster followed the same career path he, too, would have been just as limited in his usefulness and his brilliance therefore wasted.

Instead, Mr Auster’s principled decision to follow the path he did, as, personally trying and uncomfortable in many ways though it proved to be, was the right one – for it ensured that  the much greater and more universal truths implicit in his published writings will continue to be accessed and attended to by untold thousands every year.

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